


stay gold.

by towards



Category: Marvel 616
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-28 06:54:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17178026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/towards/pseuds/towards
Summary: one shot prompts from tumblr. some cute, some sad.





	1. i never wanted things to come to this.

No one died.

They might have gotten sick, they might have collapsed, they may have seen the pearly gates in a flash - but  _no one died_. Nearly a million people  _fell_  but in the end, they’d all gotten up stronger than they’d been before.

That’s the only reason why they permitted Emma to collect him. The only reason why the Avengers weren’t already bearing down their door, demanding he be handed over ‘ _for his own good’._ It was a mutant issue, allowed to be handled by mutants, until the proper paperwork had been filed and clearance would be given.

Elixir was too dangerous.

Instead of a frightened young man, they see a bio-weapon in the wrong hands. One so  _unstable_  that something as banal as  _nearly being killed_  by anti-mutant extremists leaves him terrified and  _lashing out_. Like he should take the attempts on his life with some dignity - the _enemy_  is allowed to rack up a body count and casualties in the name of the greater good, but the victim can only stand there and take it.

And he had.

Until he’d risen from death and fought back.

“Please,  _Miss Frost_ ,” Joshua is nearly sobbing, still covered in his own blood and trembling from exertion. The wound in his head has healed in record time, but the psychological damage remains. He can heal any physical ailment, but his mind is in shambles. A riotious mess of  _fear_  and  _fury_  crashing and breaking the boundaries of reason. 

_And he’d been doing so much better_.

The inhibitor collar around his neck keeps his powers dimmed for now, but they’re impossible to control. He can’t reign it in. Can’t, can’t, can’t _. One of his hands is clutching hers tightly_  and he knows what’s coming, what they have to do, what  _she_  has to do. The Avengers will take him, or O*N*E will take him - but if she winds it all back, erases the years of mistreatment and abuse. Brings him back to the  _golden boy_  who didn’t glitter in the sun, who could only heal tiny cuts and bruises, then she can protect him. Keep him under her wing without worrying that he’ll kill everyone else around him. 

( and he knows how sorely she needs a  _win_. saw how relieved she was when he was able to stay gold for a full week. when the nightmares finally eased. when he could sit with his old friends and  _laugh._ when he told her he wanted to be a doctor, a  _real one_ , who could publish studies on mutant health and resolved to  _actually study_  instead of sleeping the day away. when he’d finally said he’d  _trusted her_ , and how relived  _he’d been_  to no longer see the lingering resentment of wither’s death reflected in those icy blue eyes.

he only saw warmth.

he had a family. he had a home. he was no longer merely surviving, he was  _thriving_.

all it took was the pull of a trigger to ruin it all.. )

“Please… Please  _don’t_ …”  


( and if it doesn’t work they’ll put him down. they won’t bury him. they’ll take him to pieces and see what made him tick. use him to bring back their dead, use him to poison their enemies. 


	2. "... finish your beer."

He knew this day was coming.

Every other night he would wake miles from home. Feet aching, heart thrumming, mind  _racing_  as the former mutant homeland  _called to him_  like a siren. There were good things - oh, always good things. An entire hospice ward was cured of all their ailments,  _a miracle from heaven_  the news said. The recently deceased staggered out of coffins and into funeral parlors, their bodies restored to _working order_  regardless of what had been done before.

Alive.

Healthy. 

_Miracles_.

But the news never focuses on the good. There’s a path illness and destruction ravaging the American costline, and it’s all left by one boy. One boy who rowed himself to his own grave, one boy who never wanted to  _be this_.

Josh isn’t so much a boy anymore. He’s twenty-one as of three days ago (though he’s unsure if he should count it, he’s been  _dead_  or _comatose_  so often that he’s lost at least a year of his life) and life had stopped being kind the moment he’d first lain hands on someone to heal them. He’s equal parts  _mercy_  and  _vengeance,_  the two clashing together so often and so  _hard_  that it leaves him muddled and confused.

He should have gotten help well before this.

He should never have been left to wander the streets.

He’d known the Avengers would do something. The school, too. One or the other - they’d be racing to take him out, to  _deal with this_  because people were no longer  _people_  in their eyes. He’d been there for those meetings once, one hand covering his gashed throat as he tried to mend it, spent from fixing everyone else in the room but unable to  _sleep_  because they might need him for something else.  He remembered wishing desperately that his powers had been for something  _else. How hard it was watching_ the adults all talk about him like he wasn’t there, make plans for him like he wasn’t a  _person_ , all the while feeling like a burnt out bulb they refused to retire.

He just wanted to feel like a  _person_  again.

Wolverine hands him a beer and he knows what this is. Some kind of _peace treaty_ , less for  _him_  and more for the older mutant trying to come to terms with what he was about to do. Ending things the  _easy way_ , snuffing out someone else’s life because at the end of the day,  _he would go on_  and they would not. He doesn’t even have the energy to get angry about it, just accepts the drink from the man whose here to end him. Instead he stares into the depths of the small fire he’d made, feeling none of it’s warmth as his insides grow cold.

( wasn’t it enough that he’d gotten away? wasn’t it enough that he’d found a place  _no one_  would bother him?

wasn’t it enough that he  _ **wanted to live**_? )

“I never wanted to be on the X-Force,” he says finally, his voice catching on the words. It isn’t fair, it isn’t  _fair_  that he’d seen all this coming and had tried  _so hard_  to stop it.”  “I… I  _begged you_  not to put me on it. I never wanted to  _hurt_  anyone.”

His eyes lift. Void of color, empty since the first time he’d crawled his way back from the dead. The first time he felt the terrible pain of resurrection, the first time someone he’d loved like  _family_  had left him behind because he wasn’t worth saving. His cheeks are wet, tears of frustration trailing down golden skin, leaving black streaks in their wake. There’s no  _anger_ , only a grim acceptance and the  _fear_  of death sitting not two feet away from him.

He won’t get up this time.

They won’t bury his body.

He doesn’t want to think about what will happen to it. Only they’ll find a way to extract his secrets, he’ll continue to be of use to them after he’s dead, and then and only then will they truly be happy with what he has to offer.

Because then he won’t be a  _person_. He’ll be a thing. A cold, dead, _useful_  thing.

“Why didn’t anyone try to  _help me_? Why does everyone go out of their way to save  _you,”_ Josh draws in a shuddering breath, dropping the can and burying his face in his knees. Men aren’t supposed to cry, this is a show of  _weakness_  and he wonders if that confirms that he’s unfit to live.

_“_ Why do  ** _you_  **get so many  _second chances_  when you’re the worst of _all of us?”_


	3. stranger

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: young josh meeting sabretooth

Look.

He knows mutants are bad news. He’s seen the actual news. Been at school when it was put on lockdown because some big bag mutant was terrorizing the city and the X-Men had to come stop them. Only for it all to happen again next week, and the casualties keep piling up.

But he doesn’t think it’s right to… well, do half the stuff people do to them.

Like maybe if people just laid off things wouldn’t be so shitty for everybody. Like, you hit something dangerous with a stick enough times can you really be blamed when it finally lost it and hit back? He’d thought that when the neighbor’s dog had been put down for biting one of his brothers - Reggie had hit that dog through the fence every single day on the way to school. It wasn’t its fault that when it snapped he couldn’t take what he dished out.

Reggie hadn’t even needed stitches. But his folks had kicked up enough stink about how bad it looked that there’d just been no choice. Felt like that was how most things went.

But that’s not for him to think about. He’s all of thirteen and he can’t take another minute of his dad ranting about his bad grades (why can’t you just be more like your brothers, joshua? what will your friends think if you get held back? smarten up!) or else he’s going to go nuts. He hits the street, fires off a text to Duncan and asks if he wants to meet up and go smash stuff or something, and checks his pockets to see if there’s any smokes left and finds one.

( he doesn’t like them, they taste like butt but everybody else is doing it )

He’s only about halfway to the park when he sees the guy. Sitting in an alley, his clothes are in shreds ( actual shreds, not like his own stylishly ripped jeans and sleeves) and he looks hurt. If he were with his friends he’d keep walking and maybe crack a nasty joke or two at the man’s expense, but there’s nobody to impress here. And despite common sense telling him to keep going and not stop because some gigantic homeless dude is breathing kind of funny because that’s how kids get murdered, he does. Frowning as he pats his pockets for – something, anything, because the guy has to have been through hell and back to look like that.

Probably a mutie. Compassion aside, he doesn’t try to get too close. Figures maybe he can chuck some change from this distance or call for someone to come help him.

“Hey, mister… you okay?”


	4. it had to be done.

“I think we lose hopeless wars because we don’t go far enough.”

The power dampener around his neck tells a tale of a people who cow in the face of evil. Why bend to justice when it funds terrorist organizations that slaughter them by the thousands? 

He curls his fingers around his throat. Thinks of Laurie Collins and her pretty smile. Jay Guthrie and his choir of a voice. Thinks of all the mutants he’d shepherded out of the facility before someone had shot him, and in the interim between life and death, locked him up here.

Because to get to those mutants, he’d had to step over the bodies of their captors. Not dead, but surely not the same after he’d had his way with them. Ruining their bodies beyond repair, letting them live in the agony they caused his people daily for the rest of their lives.

The collar itches. His head lolls to the side, fixing on the crack in the tiles.

“I don’t regret what I did, Miss Munroe.” He looks up, perhaps a touch remorseful. There’s a discussion happening in the other room over what to do with him, and he thinks perhaps this is what the Scarlet Witch felt like as her friends and family squabbled over what to do with her when she’d become too dangerous and unstable to keep around. Before she’d ruined all of them forever.

“But I regret that it had to be done.”

**Author's Note:**

> context: emma's decided the best way to deal with josh's abilities going haywire is to try to strip the traumatizing triggers from his mind.


End file.
